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Black Eye was a zine out of New York, and this book offers some of the best pieces from this fiesty, piss-and-vinegar, punk-inspired series. Pieces on living your life creatively at work, fiction starring John Zerzan, journal notes on the process of a budding anarchist leaving a Trotskyist group, the taking (and taking back) of Tompkin Square Park, the significance of play, and much more.

BLACK EYE was born pathogenic and perverse in a basement in the Lower East Side’s Heart of Darkness in the 1980s. Half a dozen comrades armed with even fewer weapons (besides pens and typewriters, a few cartoons and quite a few ideas) set out to upend this rotten yuppified, spectacular world and provide first-hand reports of its demise. Initial articles ranged from paganism to the poverty of student life to the confessions of an ex-Trotskyist. Fiction and poetry complement revolutionary theory and resurgent utopianism. Eclecticism continues to be a virtue, is desired and cultivated, a political gesture itself in an era of heterogeneity. The common ingredient is liberation.

BLACK EYE wants to corrode all your received ideas and cherished ideological assumptions. It will give you a BLACK EYE if it doesn’t open your eyes, and it might just set you on an adventurous path of zero-work role refusal and you’ll discover you’re a voluntary conscript in an army of conscious egoists practicing the permanent revolution of desire.

William talks with Paul Z. Simons, a contributor to and editor of the journal Modern Slavery; A Libertarian Critique of Civilization. Mr. Simons is also an essayist and former contributor/editor of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed and Out of Anarchyamong other projects. Modern Slavery delves into the conception of a modern slavery through an explicitly radical discussion of the history and present condition of wage economies and wage slavery. In addition, the journal showcases poetry, short stories, book reviews, and art. If you wish to become a contributor, you can do so through the journals website.

Among other topics, William and Paul discuss the inspiration for and inception of the journal, some forms a post collapse society could take, other forms of modern day slavery, and the socially chaotic potential of horror movies.

This episode will stream through 01/05/14 at AFM, airing Monday/Tuesday on KWTF, podcasting at radio4all.net (link pending) and archiving later at thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org. To contact the show’s producers, email us at thefinalstrawradio(a t)riseup(dott)net